The Spirit of Tango

Generally, I go back to the past to speak about this subject. However, right now, I don’t think that is necessary, being away from home and experiencing the feelings that immigrants have, I feel that at the present, I find myself in true interaction with the energy that gave birth to this cultural movement called Tango.

I arrived in this country in the year 2001 with my dreams of a new life, of a better future. Seeking for a new love, I found (just as the ancient European immigrants did at the start of the century) a new world ready to be discovered. As they did then, I also had the need to communicate with the local habitants, to get in touch with their feelings, with their needs. I found myself in the ghetto of their frustrations and their accomplishments. I was able to understand through their customs and through the movement of their bodies, their idiosyncrasies and culture. Nowadays, as it was in the times when people immigrated trying to escape war, I can see in every Milonga, how the people of this far away land immigrate; escaping out of the consumer society and a decadent culture; seeking new experiences trying to follow their internal paths, in the hope of finding once more that transformation energy.

Many of my pupils ask me … what is the essence of tango? What is the true spirit of such a wonderful dance? I always attempt to answer using brief sentences, trying to combine words and feelings, as if these were magical invocations that won’t make them lose the interest to try to find out the answer to their questions by themselves.

Personally, I find that tango has many forms and non at all … there is always something new to discover. Tango, to me, is what the Phoenix is to the Chinese. It is art, and I say it very clearly, it is popular art, where what it is important is neither the speculations nor the acrobatics nor the eagerness to demonstrate how wonderful or superior we are, but the interrelation with each other and the own internal path.

These days with the championship style, the fake tango advances as a powerful monster. And there are certain people that confuse it with other type of dances (the classic and the contemporary) with a martial arts ball, or with archetypical cartoons that do not even attempt to look real. Or even worst still, in some cases it is treated as scientific discovery, which will help you to achieve eternal health, good posture and millions of dollar.

For me the spirit that achieved such a wonderful dance with its poetry and music were not the famous stars in the magazines but man’s eternal yearning for finding its own centre and the communication with everything.

It is unimportant how many fashions come and go; or how many transformations it sustains. The true tango will arise and it will carry on being a popular and true art, where it is not important how complicated the sequences are, or how high I can lift my legs, or how inflated my ego is when explaining a complex figure; the true tango will emerge from the wonderful poetry that a desperate and despairing man writes to lift up his lost hope. It will arise from the feeling of holding tight the person we love, from the music composed by the rain as it dances over the rooftops. Tango will arise not in the security of a gym but from man’s fabulous adventure to find the language to communicate with the spirit of everything.